I am folding a week’s worth of laundry and stacking it on my bed when this thought occurs to me: I haven’t moved on from my husband’s death, nor gotten over it. I have, instead, somehow folded it into my current life. Ron, gone for five years today, is still very much a part of who I am. Every cell of my being, every drop of my blood, is still filled with the man I loved and lived with for 44 years. To change that, I would need to change my physical makeup. I would need to expunge him from my life.
That sounds more final than his death.
Several cross-sectional studies have found that widowhood often correlates with a detrimental effect on the mental and physical health of the surviving spouse (Rosenbloom & Whittington, 1993; Schone & Weinick, 1998; Venters et al., 1986). Marriage is seen as a positive factor in influencing our lives; widowhood, not so much. Despite the fact that more than half of all women over 65 become widows, there have been very few studies to look at the transition a woman must make when the word “widow” becomes her identifier (Wilcox et al., 2003).
Yet here I am, five years later, healthy and mostly happy. I’ve retired from 30 years of teaching, settled into a life of two with my autistic adult son and my older son and daughter nearby; joined a new church with new responsibilities; and embarked upon a writing ministry. I haven’t succumbed to the “widow effect” (Holmes, 2024). While the word “widow” will always be one of my identifiers, I have so many others—teacher, writer, mother, sister, aunt, editor, friend—that “widow” takes up but one small slice.
My life has continued. As a baker might fold eggs into cake batter, I have folded the years with my loved husband into my being. His presence has made, and continues to make, my life richer and more meaningful. Yes, there are moments of grief. Today is one of them when I recall how my daughter and I left on Friday, July 12, 2019, to visit my 90-year old father at his beach house, and returned home around 9PM on Saturday, July 13, to find that Ron had been called to Heaven.
The days after that were difficult as my adult autistic son found unique ways to process his grief and I began my new journey as a widow.
But here I am, folding laundry on a bed I bought three years ago because it was time to have one I had not shared with Ron. Here I am, weeping a few tears for the coming years of retirement that my husband, ill for the last nineteen years of his life, will not get to physically share with me. Here I am, living—as my friend Donna Woolam would say—my best life because to do less would dishonor Ron. Or as a writing mentor, Mindy Kiker, tells me, “Growing in the hard places.”
So here I am, thankful for the years I had with him, although the last two decades were often difficult, because those years and the sweetness of his love will never leave me. I know my beloved is part of the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) and cheers me on.
It is a day of sadness but also a day of joy; I was adored by a wonderful man.
Is there someone in your life—a husband, parent, friend—who is still very much present for you even after death? How do you honor that person?